Seagate 7200.9 500GB: Mouthwatering Benchmarks
by Purav Sanghani on October 24, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004
So far, NCQ proves to be a feature that could easily be non-existent when running single tasks at a time. Because NCQ is a technology that is designed to handle random requests for data, the only way to test it efficiently is to throw a few applications at it and run a few tasks at the same time. This will definitely give a hard drive a workout.
Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
So far, NCQ proves to be a feature that could easily be non-existent when running single tasks at a time. Because NCQ is a technology that is designed to handle random requests for data, the only way to test it efficiently is to throw a few applications at it and run a few tasks at the same time. This will definitely give a hard drive a workout.
Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
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Googer - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Once again NCQ did not aide these drives to deliver higher performance. It is my speculation that we will need an Operating System that can take advantage of NCQ before we could see any performance gains from it. Untill then Keep it disabled.KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
NCQ is very vendor specific. Some drives benefit more than others from it.Kristopher
PuravSanghani - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
NCQ is actually beneficial in server applications where disk requests are occuring very frequently as opposed to a desktop PC scenario where disk access is not as critical.We are trying to research ways to benchmark this but if any of you have any suggestions, please feel free to send an email with any ideas you have.
Thanks,
Purav
Byte - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
with an icredible 5 year warranty i exclusively use seagate. Suprisingly i've never had a chance to test out Seagates replacement steps. I've returned dozens of WDs, Maxtors, and IBMs. Looks like seagates on a role.Griswold - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Such is life. I've seen quite a few Seagates die, yet, never had a problem with WD in more than 10 years of using them.One persons experience is hardly statistically correct. :)
DrZoidberg - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I own a 200gig Seagate 7200.7 SATA, and though the synthetic benchmarks like Winstone, Sysmark, Seagate is like at middle of pack most of the time, when it comes to like Real world tests like loading game levels Seagate is generally faster, sometimes even better than WD Raptor. The File zip times are pretty good as well.I'm always suprised at this, something that is average in synthetic benchmarks to do quite well in real world tests.
imaheadcase - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I think its time to start shipping hardrive coolers standard with drive purchases like they do CPUs. heheScrogneugneu - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Well, I still wait the moment I'm supposed to say "Oh dear God this hard disk is fast!"...It qualifies in the middle of the disks, and under some conditions (in fact, only during the DOOM III loading test) stands out... but it falls short (VERY short) of impressing me...
Did you ever noticed that, for example, during the zip test, the vast majority of the disks differ only by 4 or 5 seconds on a minute of encoding? And in the case of unzipping, it's down to 1 or 2 seconds? Where am I supposed to notice the greater speed?
"I got the fastest hard drive in the world, I can zip my 300 MB files 3 seconds faster than you! You're jaleous, aren't you?"
PrinceGaz - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Yes, after the earlier promotional article about this drive, and now the title "Mouthwatering Benchmarks", I was expecting to be blown away by the blisteringly fast speed of the drive. It seemed pretty average really, nothing special at all apart from a high capacity (matched by a high price).blackbrrd - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I completely agree, having a title like "Seagate 7200.9 500GB: Mouthwatering Benchmarks" for this review is just wrong. Anandtech might get more hits in the short run, but looses credibility while doing so.I really don't like review sites that have misleading titles.